A common “exploit” I’ve found in both of the Democracy games I’ve played (3 and 4) is being able to bring a group like State Employees or Patriots to 100% membership without backlash, slowdown, or any hindrance to achieving it as far as I can tell. Once a single group makes up the entire population, the game becomes dead easy to accomplish almost anything and any nuance or complexity is lost since everyone is X group, and X group is happy. Now I’m not saying this should not be achievable, but the ease that it can be done is a bit annoying for me. A few separate solutions I’ve considered are counter-group(s) backlash, a maximum membership cap of 90% or 95% (or adding a hindering curve to membership effect as it nears 100%), or a stronger polarization effect before such an arguably unrealistic unified utopia can be made.
I do not think such things should not be achievable given enough commitment and singular purpose, but they definitely should not be easy either
I find this is commonly not the case. People are in multiple groups simultaneously, and if some of the groups they are in are pissed off, they account for that.
My plays for example tend to see high proportions of environmentalists and commuters, as well as some other population groups who will all be in high green opinion of me. However one of the mods I run makes getting rid of religion more difficult, and boy do those guys hate me. The near 100% opinion of even multiple groups doesn’t reliably save me from the piss offs.
Based on my current game, the pissed off groups have not had a single response to any of the actions I’ve taken all game. Security policies are low to moderate but there has not been a single warning or threat or any kind of event. I’m getting 98% of the votes every election. This is pretty common in my games.
It’s annoying how easy it seems to be achievable by just playing a populist briefly then stacking up your core supporter membership up as high as possible, regardless of how much flip-flopping I do in my politics. After that I’m getting like 30 Political Capital a turn and I’m basically in sandbox mode with how freely I can change policies with little pushback. Obviously if I intentionally pick policies that would piss off supporters en masse I’m gonna be in trouble, but not committing political suicide doesn’t really equal difficulty. In addition, I haven’t used mods. It’s impossible to talk about game balance if you’re including mods.
I do agree that it should be REALLY hard to 100% any group in the game. Sadly its just an endless case of finding where/how this is possible and tweaking some numbers. I would hate to have special case code everywhere to prevent it.
Maybe there is a method to code a system that would prevent this, but I’d like to make the game work from first principles rather than be coded in too artificial or ‘gamey’ a way.
I’m sure not all groups can be 100%ed in the current game. For example, the retired, or parents, young etc.
To take an example such as religious. What in the real world actually stops 100% of a population being religious? There certainly are countries in the developing world where religious belief is extremely high.
I guess a related question is to whether or not in general the game allows voter group memberships to change too fast (probably!)
I full understand the problem of tweaking and micromanaging every exception being an unrealistic expectation, but assuming there is an attainable solution to this problem that doesn’t require overburdening you guys I’d love to continue searching for it.
From what it seems you are correct in saying not all groups can be 100%ed. But the ones that can (from my experience: Liberals, Environmentalists, Conservatives, Religious, and on rare occasion State Employees) become an unshakable rock that you really can’t fall off without trying. I suppose changing the rate of membership change would help, albeit the core problem is still there assuming you could maintain stability with the extended rate happens.
Another alternative could be to empower groups traditionally in conflict to varying degrees with the nearing 100%ed group. This could be somewhat messy to setup to define counter-groups or giving groups variable polarity levels that define how “counter” a group is, but I think it would work towards the direction of making overwhelming majorities less sustainable or harder to setup without risk.
Alternatively, you could create minor Crises associated with overwhelming majorities in specific groups; I can easily think of a few of the top of my head for Socialists (corruption or ineffecitve leaders), Capitalists (worker riots or amoral practices in the name of profit), Religious (stagnation from traditionalists or conflicts with other nations), Liberals (radical libertarianism), etc.
Would it be possible to have the voter group memberships push back as they get close to 100% or 0%? Have a boost to membership for being close to 0% and a reduction for being close to 100%? This would represent some people being stubborn.
Personally, I think it should be possible to have 100%, we shouldn’t make it systematically impossible. However, a backlash system would be ideal in my eyes for preventing unrealistic growth.
Sudden, extreme change should generate anger and hatred from oppositional groups. Where a policy massively promotes a liberal agenda, there should be a Red Bubble of conservative backlash. Where there is a highly capitalistic reform, there should be a Red Bubble for socialist backlash.
Backlash would feasibly contain membership increase, as well as opinion decrease with that group, and perhaps become a contributing factor to things like Fake News or Polarisation if left unchecked/ combined with other factors that already influence those things.
That would make it so sudden change is a threat to your stability, and therefore a threat to reelection.
And since the issue is that we can make a very quick and sudden shift to society in order to make 100% of people a certain belief system, this solves that problem by forcing places to do it slower.
Something I need to work on in the game is the homogeneity of how people react. Basically people are not different enough. We don’t have a system to generate super-super-loyal liberals who will never change their views, even in 30 years, or people 100% committed to environmentalism who will never ever lose interest in that cause.
The same is true with party loyalty.
Its all just more and more tweaking of numbers and looking at data!